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Originally Posted by volante
Here's a quick global warming related intelligence test - if ALL the ocean's icebergs were to melt tomorrow, by how much do you think global sea levels would rise?
Here's a clue - it might not be by as much as most people think  |
Sea levels are minally important to the equation. Sure, it'll suck if you have beachfront, but... well, cope. The REAL problems with melting pack ice is:
More light fresh water flooding the system can have disasterous effects on the oceanic heat conveyer, which keeps the planet more or less uniformly warm... shut that down, and the poles freeze while the the equator fries. We're talking drastically altered temperatures here... new ice age with insanely hot tropics weather. "Easy" habitability will be squeezed into relatively narrow bands in the north and south between the advancing glaciers and the new deserts.
Pack ice and underwater ice are carbon sinks that contain *A LOT* of methane (methyl hydrates) which will be released into the atmosphere as the melt continues. You think the greenhouse effect is bad now? Wait'll all that gets up in the air.
The rapid temperature alterations are going to wreak havoc with established ecosystems. Yes, the earth will balance and flora + fauna will move around and re-establish itself... eventually. We're talking scales of eons though, not years.
In the end, I'm sure the *earth* will survive just fine. We humans, however, and potentially the entire current planetary ecology may well end up as a short lived footnote before the planet drops everything flat out and goes back to breeding prokaryotes around oceanic thermal vents.
Technology can do a lot to help out here. If someone came up with a solid, energy efficient, cheap, easily available way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, it'd go a long way to solving the problem... or at least our contributions to the problem. I bet people would hug those carbon sequestering devices if they had one.